I taught a special flash workshop over the past two days, at Sheridan College. Seven students, great crowd.

Here, a few images:

Next, a one flash portrait. Yes, you can do some great stuff using just one flash. The flash was fitted with a Honl Photo grid – without that, it could not have worked. Fired by pocketwizards. This student looks like Queen Nefertiti, we decided:

Funny, aunt and niece, who, contrary to what you might think looking at this image, both have a great sense of humour:

And finally, me, by one of the students. A standard four light portrait:

About this portrait:

It uses a key light, a fill light two stops darker, a hair light, and a background light. Four flashes.

Key and fill were strobes; the others were speedlights.

They were all fired by pocketwizards.

The background was light grey. That makes it difficult, to add colour to it, so we used a considerable distance between me and the background. (The background needs to be dark before you can add colour to it).

And finally the easiest shot. Now I warn you, the sample below was shot from the back of my camera with my iPhone, and then further mangled by Facebook, so do not look at the quality. Look at the idea instead.

So simple. One flash, located behind the subject, aimed at the backround. And a part Harvey Weinstein lookalike in the foreground.

A few things work very well in composing images. I shall reiterate a few of them here, using recent photos:

First, framing. It is often a good idea to frame the object you are shooting. Use overhanging trees. A window frame. Or get even more creative, like here:

Not that every frame leads to a good picture – but some do, so learn to spot them.

Another technique that we often like: use reflections. Like here, since water is often a good source.

What did I use in the picture above? Yes, my speedlight. On camera, and zoomed in to 125mm, even though the lens is wide. And as you see, I did not use the rule of thirds in the vertical sense: because I wanted to get the reflection in.

There there’s “close-far”. Use a wide lens and get close to something in order to show depth:

And one more picture just for fun:

That images uses the above, plus it uses the background in order to tell a story.

There’s more – like the use of colour, and simplifying. A bit of thinking goes a long way in composing your shots!

So you want to take a clear picture of something, to post. Super clear, like this:

Then I have a few tips for you!

Ensure you have plenty of light; preferably reflected light. Like at a window, but not in direct sunlight.

Take the picture from some distance away rather than from very close up. Then crop. This results in an overall clearer image, because very close up images suffer from lack of depth of field, and are hard to focus accurately.

Sharpen the image. I use ProCamera, a camera/edit app that costs a few dollars, but is worth every penny.

If you follow those three steps, your phone images will be better than ever!